Could you double productivity in your business or leapfrog over
competitors? Think these are just dreams? Not so fast. Stretch
goals can make the impossible happen--"that's the formula
for turning fantasy into fact," says Jeff Blackman, a
management consultant in Chicago and author of Peak Your
Profits (Career Press). "When President Kennedy said
we'd have a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, many
people laughed. But it happened, and that shows us exactly what a
stretch goal can accomplish."

Doubling your employees' productivity isn't easy. But is
it harder than landing a man on the moon and bringing him back
alive? "You'll never know how great your people can be if
you start off telling yourself to be realistic in setting a
goal," says Bill Roche, an executive coach in Silver Spring,
Maryland. "My advice: Start off very big when setting a
stretch goal. Even when the goal isn't achieved, you've
focused the attention of your people on how great you want to
become."

Plentiful research emphasizes the value of setting huge goals,
says Deborah Crown, a professor at the University of Alabama's
College of Commerce and Business Administration in Tuscaloosa.
"For a real stretch goal, you want to set it at the 10 percent
difficulty level--meaning that one person in 10 can be expected to
accomplish it," says Crown. "Research says this is the
ideal difficulty level when you want to get people initiating,
working harder and squarely directing their efforts at achieving
goals."

Why so stiff a challenge? "That difficulty level means the
goal is tough--but it can still be achieved. It will stretch
people," says Crown. Better still, she adds, you can bet that
nearly 90 percent of your workers will come through. "How can
that be? The goal itself is motivating. It gets people to give that
extra effort and to keep on pushing."

To achieve results, you've got to properly define the
goal--and that's not always easy. Vague goals are worthless.
For instance, "Work harder!" isn't a goal that
motivates anybody. But "increase productivity by
12 percent within three weeks"--that is a clear, useful goal.
"Goals need to be both specific and quantifiable," says
Don Vlcek, a former Domino's Pizza vice president who is now a
business consultant and author of The Domino Effect
(Business One Irwin).

But a quantifiable goal isn't enough. A valid stretch goal
also needs to have measures that identify progress toward it.
"Any long-term goal has to be broken down into monthly, even
weekly steps along the way," says Crown. "Workers are
much less likely to slack off when forward motion is continually
monitored."

"You need a continuing stream of feedback whenever you are
really stretching," agrees Charles Garfield, an Oakland,
California, speaker and author of Peak Performance (Warner
Books). "The Apollo moon flight was off-course 90
percent of the time between here and the moon," recalls
Garfield, who worked at NASA on the Apollo mission. "But
Apollo had feedback mechanisms that allowed it to make rapid course
corrections."

Will any stretch goal suffice? For the most part, yes, but there
is one thing to avoid: "A goal that is absolutely unattainable
will frustrate and demoralize workers and can lead to internal
squabbling about who's to blame for the failure," warns
Crown. Stretch your workers, in other words, but don't break
them.

Heart And Goal

By sidestepping the pitfalls, will success be yours when you set
a stretch goal? Results can virtually be guaranteed, but only if
"you have first won the hearts and minds of your workers. When
they are on board with the goal--they agree that it is important
and can be done--you really will get dramatic improvement,"
vows Roche.

How to win this commitment? Level with your people about why the
goal is critical. Tell your workers about big gains made by
competitors, the more stringent demands imposed by customers, or
whatever it is that necessitates a jump forward. Make the case
clearly, and your employees will get the message that this goal is
crucial--and they will join the pursuit.

What if your team still falls short? The better question is: How
close did they come? If you've set a stretch goal that's
way out there and some team members fall a bit short, this is no
time for long faces. They all have triumphed, even if they
didn't go the full distance.

Then, too, "ask yourself why they came up short," says
Crown. "Did environmental factors hinder their efforts? Did
the behaviors of other employees impede their progress? Were the
goals clearly communicated in the first place?" She suggests
using these occasions as opportunities to conduct a post-mortem
analysis that avoids blame and instead searches for ways to improve
so that next time, the goal is achieved.

If they have triumphed, however, "incentives are called
for," says Vlcek. "Incentives don't have to be
expensive, but you want to acknowledge the workers' terrific
efforts." With what? At Domino's, Vlcek sat in on many
meetings of franchise operators with store employees and, he says,
"I saw lots and lots of $25 to $50 incentives passed out to
workers who achieved stretch goals. A gift certificate for dinner
for two at a fancy restaurant can be a big treat. Little incentives
really can fire up employees."

When the party's over, should you announce a new, bigger
stretch goal? First, know the danger: Do this, and it's easy
for workers to see themselves as nothing more than cogs in a wheel
spun by a never-satisfied management. Big auto makers found
themselves viewed in that light a few years ago, and the upshot was
worker slowdowns, coupled, in a few cases, with intentional
sabotage of cars on the assembly line. "You can easily create
a `management keeps doing this to us' attitude among your
workers," warns Crown.

But, she adds, in the right, deft management hands, "you
can keep ratcheting up stretch goals. In an organization
where there's lots of communication, plenty of openness and
trust, you can do it--if you can persuade the workers there are
good business reasons for the new goals."

"Set big goals, and you can really bring your workers to
life. They'll surprise you," says Roche. "As long as
you have their hearts and minds, stretch goals can keep working
magic."

Robert McGarvey writes on business psychology and management
topics for several national publications. To reach him online with
your questions or ideas, e-mail rjmcgarvey@aol.com.